Where the Forest Ends
by coxorangepippin
Summary: In the heart of the great wood that the villagers know only as The Forest, lives an immortal tree spirit that calls himself Yuuri. On the edge of The Forest lives Viktor Nikiforov, one of the greatest hunters in the world, ostracised and despised. When the two meet, deep in the heart of the wood, will the capricious spirit of the forest decide to abandon Viktor, or to save him?
1. The Forest

Darkness lay heavy over the endless sea of trees. The forest stretched as far as the eye could see, blanketing the scarred earth and swaddling the base of the mountain, covering the rocky outcrops in roots and hiding treacherous ravines beneath the deceptively soft fronds of pine and fir.

The forest was never silent, even when the new moon rendered it invisible. The restless wind sighed in the branches of trees, and the occasional crack of a falling bough sounded like a thunderclap. The frantic pattering feet of prey sounded as a staccato counterpoint to the soft, slow lope of the predators, punctuated here and there by a snarl or a final anguished squeal. Wolves howled their eerie ululations, answered by the voices of their pack, the sound bouncing from the bare stone at the sheer edge of the mountain and dying when it reached the trees.

On this night in particular, there was one other sound which disturbed the velvet darkness. Stealthy footsteps, too heavy to be a wolf and too light to be a bear, disturbed the usual tapestry of forest sounds, along with the occasional snap of a twig followed by a soft curse.

The footsteps reached the edge of what the local people called 'The Devil's Cut', a sheer rocky gorge that cleft the edge of the mountain as though carved by a knife. The omnipresent trees could not grow on the edge of the Cut, save for a few stunted and tenacious thorn bushes, and the lack of trees gave some slight relief from the disorienting darkness.

Silhouetted on the edge of the sheer drop, stood a deer, a stag, probably several summers old judging by the antlers which branched several times above his head, covered in pale lichen. The wind rattled the branches above the stag's broad head, and he looked up, startled, his haunches tense, preparing to spring away. Before he could move, however, there was a faint twang, and a rush of air. The stag blinked, and the arrow buried itself in between his eyes.

He was dead before he hit the forest floor.

A quiet huff of relief came from the edge of the treeline, several metres from the edge of the Cut. The soft footsteps, still as stealthy as before, resumed their passage, and in the darkness a man's shape approached the stag's body, walking carefully but with purpose. The barely-existent light of the moon still somehow caught in the man's hair, shining a brilliant silver, flaring like a beacon in the dark wood.

The hunter pulled out a length of rope, and began to bind the stag in a loose net, before pulling the corpse on to his back and over his shoulders, grunting with the effort. He disappeared back into the treeline, and was immediately swallowed by the darkness, his silver hair extinguishing as though snuffed out.

And though the hunter didn't know it, he did not venture back into the treacherous forest alone.

A single tallow candle cast a soft, welcoming glow as Viktor heaved the door open, filling the air with a faint animal musk. Viktor staggered through the threshold, lurching with weariness and relief; he had survived another hunt in the treacherous wood that the locals would only call 'The Forest'.

He took a few more steps into the frigid air of the store-room, and heaving his broad shoulders, he tipped the stag on to the wide wooden table that ran down its centre. Pausing only to brush silver hair out of his eyes, Viktor pulled out a long, cruel looking knife, and went to work.

When he finally reached his own door later that night ( _or was it the morning now_? his exhausted brain wondered), he was covered in long streaks of blood, and his hands were shaking with weariness and cold. He lit a beeswax candle, letting the smell of distant summer perfume the air and dispel the tang of iron and fear that his preparation of the stag had left sunk into his pores. Viktor sighed, looking longingly at the heather filled mattress and furs that took up one wall; but his disgust for the drying blood on his skin momentarily overcame his exhaustion.

Gritting his teeth against the cold, Viktor opened the small door at the back of his cabin and stepped out, back into the darkness. A mountain stream, fed by snowmelt, ran past the back of the house, deepening into a wide pool that appeared bottomless on this moonless night.

Viktor stripped off his hunting clothes of soft woven leather, dropping them behind the back door to be washed in the morning. His long, lithe muscles bent and stretched as Viktor rolled his shoulders, luxuriating in the freedom to move without fear of being heard. Mindful of the cold, he untied the knot that held his long braid securely behind his head, allowing his blood-stained silver hair to spread out across his bare shoulders, pooling like mercury in the hollows of his back.

Taking a deep breath, Viktor walked slowly into the deep pool, feeling the breathtaking cold numb his aching muscles as soon as the water touched them. The grime of the bloody kill, the detritus of the forest that had marred his pale skin, began sloughing away in the fast current. Viktor watched the blood free itself from his skin and twirl away into the dark water, as though it had never existed, leaving his skin luminous as the moon.

Viktor allowed his mind to relax, the last of the adrenalin from venturing into The Forest dissipating as he let the stream flow over him.

He never enjoyed the hunt. Of course, he had to eat, and in this cold season the village would be glad of the extra meat, but when he closed his eyes and floated in the dark pool, he still saw the shocked expression on the stag's face as his arrow ( _perfectly aimed, always perfectly aimed_ ) snuffed out its life.

Viktor sighed, and realised that he had been in the water for too long; the last thing that he needed was to catch a chill. Heaving himself out on to the grassy bank, his wet hair clinging to his muscled back and chest, Viktor walked the few feet to his back door and into the welcoming glow of the candle. As he shut the door behind him, the light winked out.

And the dark eyes which had watched him blinked once, and disappeared.

ooooooooooooooo

In The Forest, countless creatures had been born, lived their short lives, and died. Countless trees had grown from inch high seedlings, to saplings, to giants that towered one hundred and fifty feet above the forest floor, and then been split by lightning to lie blackened and broken. But from the charred remains, insects made homes. Predators or scavengers would eat the animals that died, using them to support their own lives. The snow that lay heavy on the forest in the dead of moonless nights in winter would freeze the blood of the smaller creatures, leaving them stiff and lifeless, but when it melted in the first weak sunlight of spring, it supported new life everywhere that it touched in the carpet of ferns and lichens that brightened the forest floor like careless splashes of paint.

This cycle had rolled on, endlessly renewing itself, for as long as The Forest had existed (and no one human now lived who knew how old it truly was). Destruction and death would give way to new life; even forest fires, which scarred the landscape and left the charred remains of mammals in their wake, renewed the trees. No creature was insignificant; no creature was eternal.

No creature but one. In the very centre of the forest, in a clearing that no human eye had ever seen, there stood the First Tree. It was a white pine, so ancient and colossal that ten men with their arms touching would not be able to encircle its trunk. Its crown was two hundred feet above the forest floor, the blue-silver needles reaching towards the sun as though to embrace it, the white-tinged bark covered almost entirely by the pale, delicate green of lichen and the jewel bright green of moss.

The tree stood in the centre of the clearing, its branches reaching out on every side to touch the edge of the forest which surrounded it, its roots forming a twisted carpet. Here, the muffled quiet which pervaded most of The Forest abruptly ended. Crickets sang their metallic, grating song in the long grass that waved around and through the gnarled roots. Rabbits made their dens underneath it; foxes too, and though beyond the shelter of the tree they were predator and prey, in this clearing they lived side by side without so much as a snap of the jaws. The harsh calls of crows and the soft warbling of wood pigeons filtered down through the endless maze of branches, and the sunlight that reached the floor of the clearing seemed somehow richer and stronger than that which periodically pierced The Forest's canopy.

The First Tree was the origin of The Forest, the starting point for the immense living carpet that stretched for thousands of miles in each direction. Any creature lost in The Forest would orient itself by the First Tree, and any injured creature would try to limp its way through the underbrush to the clearing, as they found wounds healed more quickly in the rich sunlight.

When the tree had first set down its hair-fine roots, standing less than two inches tall, it had been no different to any other plant. But as it had grown, and the forest had grown around it, the tree had developed, if not a personality, then a presence. Maybe it was some strange magic in the ground it grew in, maybe it was the moon under which it had first opened its leaves, but as it reached its sixth century of life, it became evident that this was no ordinary tree, as different from the forest that surrounded it as night was different from day.

On a winter morning, when the ground was rimed with white frost and the needles of the white fir were dotted with icicles, something in the heart of the tree had begun to grow.

In the spring, when the blood of the tree had flared to life with the return of the sun, something in the heart of the tree had stirred.

In the summer, when the tree supported countless new lives in the fox kits and shrieking young birds, and its covering of moss glowed like a jewel in the heat of the sun, the heart of the tree had its first thought, and the thought was 'I'.

In the autumn, when the deciduous trees had begun to blaze like the sunset and then fall to cover the ground in their dying radiance, the heart of the tree had its second thought, and the thought was 'I am…'

And one year after the first leap of life in the heart of the tree, when the winter had returned unforgiving and beautiful, the heart of the tree opened like the unfolding of wide wooden arms, and from the exposed pale circles of wood which had never seen the sunlight, the heart of the tree leapt forth.

He landed unsteadily on bare, blinding feet, which touched the sharp frost as though it were a carpet of goose down. He was naked, but the air felt to him as though it were a fine summer day; his hair was dark, and his eyes were darker as they widened in wonder at the sight of the clearing he stood in.

The heart of the tree looked up at the white pine which towered above him, and his laughter was like the song of a nightingale.

For a thousand years, the heart of the tree wandered through the forest, nameless but full of joy, ageless and light footed, its protector and spirit, and the forest acknowledged him as its King. He spoke with the wolves of blood and the full moon and pack that was family. He crooned to the trees in their long, slow language, that was green and soft, of the joy of spring, the pain of winter and the slow beat of sap that they felt within their branches. He ran with the deer, laughing at the speed and the single mind of the herd that had hundreds of bodies.

One day, in his wanderings, the heart of the tree came to the edge of the forest. He hadn't known that the forest had an edge; he had assumed that his kingdom ran on forever, dark trees reaching to the ends of the earth. As his wide, dark eyes had peered around the edge of the trees, he had seen something entirely new; small huts, made from wood (which made his heart clench in anger, something he had never known before), with smoke drifting from holes in their centres. This was strange, and frightening; he felt the life of each tree slowly ebbing, dissipating into the air as they sat broken in these strange, unnatural shapes.

And then he saw the creatures. They were the same shape as him, with the same eyes and hair; but he could feel their spirits were not the same, as their spirits burned far brighter and smaller, a tiny fire racing to burn its fuel. The heart of the forest knew that they would have brief lives, and felt himself intrigued by these strange newcomers.

He spent several days sitting at the edge of the forest, listening to them talk and sing, and as he learned their language he learned what they called themselves; the males were men, the females women. But they also had names for each other. The heart of the tree had never heard of such a thing before; deer had no names, and though trees did have names, they were just syllables of the overall cycle of life and death that the trees went through each year; they didn't convey _personality_. But these names did.

And the heart of the First Tree began to feel something he had no name for. The companionship that these humans shared was something he had never known. Running alone through the forest, the heart of the tree had laughed with joy, and he had never felt the lack of company because he had never known that company existed; but now he began to edge closer towards the edge of the trees, wanting to join in the songs that the humans sang every night at sundown, and wanting to ask them what they meant.

One evening when he had listened to the songs, he had heard a name that he found struck something within his heart; it was the name of an old adventurer, one who had (so the songs said) wandered the earth alone for many years, and eventually died in the centre of a forest.

So when the heart of the tree had left the edge of the forest, running quickly and silently through the trees back into his kingdom, he had rolled the name around his brain and mouth, tasting it, and finding that it fitted.

On that day, the heart of the tree became Yuuri.

He periodically returned to the edge of the forest to watch the humans, finding their short lives fascinating. Though when he next returned he felt as though he had only been gone a few minutes, the dwellings of the humans had multiplied, and there seemed to be far more of them; and the faces that he remembered from his first visit were gone, although Yuuri thought he found a hint of them in the faces of the newcomers.

And so it was for another thousand years. Yuuri felt the passing of the years as nothing more than the inevitable turn of the seasons; they did not change him, his pale skin unblemished and his step as light as the day he had stepped out of the First Tree. As Yuuri watched the villagers, he wondered that they covered themselves, and stitched himself clothes from silver fox fur. The cluster of dwellings grew with the years, and though Yuuri was fascinated by the humans, their use of the trees from his forest pained him, feeling every tree as a loss.

And then, one day, the humans began to venture deeper into the forest. They had always stayed at the edge before, and Yuuri had always hidden himself warily; but one particularly cold winter, they penetrated the edge of the forest and began to hunt deep within the trees, mapping the edge of the mountain and forging paths as they did so. They shot the noblest of the stags; they hunted the wolves, and they caught rabbits in numbers that Yuuri found sickening. He knew that each animal died in time, but then they would give their life back to the forest and allow the cycle to begin again; these humans broke the cycle, taking without giving back, burning trees and splitting the unbroken forest with their paths.

Yuuri felt a cold anger settle into his heart for these humans, these short-lived creatures, which dared to interfere so deeply in his forest, _his_ kingdom. He returned to the First Tree, and from then on only ever ventured as far as the deep gorge which split the side of the mountain, the one he had heard the humans call 'The Devil's Cut'. And from that day on, the villagers began to say that The Forest had grown hostile; branches would drop close by their heads, and roots seemed to deliberately try and tangle their horses fetlocks, breaking their legs and leaving the hunters at the mercy of the ever present wolves.

Several centuries passed, and Yuuri nearly forgot the humans, their existence overwritten in his mind by the seasons that passed like the blinking of an eye, and the slow growth of the trees.

Until one night, in which no moon shone, and no starlight reached the forest floor through the dense canopy of trees. Yuuri wandered through the forest, feeling the dense moss and stones under his feet, running his hands through the soft fronds of ferns, tasting the clean air. He jumped up into the canopy, and sat on the wide branch of a mountain ash which hung out over the edge of the Cut, swinging his feet in the dark air, feeling the rusk of the wind between his toes. A stag ran past him, a noble animal with several years worth of antlers on his broad head, and Yuuri acknowledged him gravely with a nod of his head. The stag paused in its run, silhouetted on the edge of the Cut, and looked at Yuuri to return the courtesy; and with a brutal suddenness, it fell, dead from an arrow between its eyes. Yuuri's heart clenched in sadness and fear; he darted from the long limb he sat on, moving close to the trunk of the tree, shrouded in the darkness.

And as Yuuri watched, the hunter emerged from the treeline with a small huff of satisfaction, his silver hair illuminating the dark night with an inner luminescence, his face turned away so that Yuuri could not see it. He was tall, broad shouldered; he had the slow lope of a predator. Yuuri narrowed his dark eyes, his hatred of the almost-forgotten humans rearing again within his heart. But then the man turned to pick up the stag, and in doing so revealed his face to Yuuri as he stood still in the crown of the mountain ash, able to see in the darkness as clearly as if it were day.

His ice-blue eyes were deep set over a long, straight nose and firm mouth. His jaw was sharp, his cheekbones sharper; the face of an apex predator, one who had little to fear from the dark forest. His silver hair hung in a long brain down his back, reaching to the bottom of his spine; it moved as though with a life of its own as he bent to pull the arrow from the stag's forehead, and began to bind it.

Yuuri was fascinated. He had never seen a human that looked like this, so at one with the forest, so beautiful and dangerous; like a frozen lake with inky black depths, so solid and safe until it cracked as you stepped on the very centre, out of reach of the shore. And, there was something else, Yuuri thought. The spirits of the humans he had seen in the village had flared brightly, violently, rising and falling as untamed as a wildfire. But this one…

His spirit was soft, diffused throughout his body like soft moonlight, the same silver as his hair. Yuuri had never seen anything like him before. As the hunter shouldered the stag with a grunt, and began to make his torturously slow way back through the forest away from the Cut, Yuuri followed, leaping silently from tree to tree, keeping his eyes fixed on the moonglow of the hunter's spirit.

When they reached the edge of the trees, Yuuri saw him disappear into a long, low building, and soon smelled the iron tang of fresh blood.

After an hour or so, the hunter emerged, streaked with drying blood, his perfect silver hair marred with it. The corner of Yuuri's mouth turned down in displeasure, but not at the death of the stag; he didn't like the sight of one so beautiful tarnished with death.

Yuuri's dark eyes tracked his movements as the hunter disappeared into a smaller wooden building, watching as a dim, flickering light flared to life in the window. The hunter emerged from the back door, and walked a few feet to where a deep pool swirled darkly in the fast mountain current.

As Yuuri watched, the hunter stripped off his bloodied clothes, and Yuuri's heart began to beat faster, his pulse thrumming softly in his veins. He studied the naked musculature of the human, the white column of his throat and his shoulder muscles rippling as he rolled them. Then, he released his hair, and it flowed over his back like a ripple of sunlight.

The man walked forward into the dark water, and began to wash off the taint of death that Yuuri had hated. The blood whirled away in the current, and the man stood clean and resplendent in the dark night air; Yuuri sensed that the dawn was not far away, and the faintest of grey light illuminated the hunter as he walked, his hair now plastered flat against his torso, back into the small wooden house.

Yuuri felt his heart sink slightly, his pulse still thrumming, and did not know what he felt. He blinked, once, and then darted back into the slowly lightening forest.


	2. The Hunt

Viktor woke slowly the next morning, the exertions of the previous night's hunt making his movements heavy and sore. His eyes fluttered open, long silver lashes touching his cheek once, twice, before he rubbed the sleep from his eyes and regained consciousness fully. Sitting up, several furs fell off his naked form on to the hard wooden floor, slithering across the ground as though still alive.

These first few moments of waking were always when Viktor felt his isolation the most. Every day he awoke alone, before mending his weapons, washing his clothes, and planning the next night's hunt. And every day he had to endure the wary eyes of the villagers, which sometimes flared into open malice.

Viktor's thick, soft silver hair curled around his sleep-warmed limbs, and he stared at the sleek coils with dislike. Every other person in the village, and every person that the people in the village could remember back to their farthest ancestors, had had dark hair and dark eyes. It was one of the few common features in a village in which skin colour ranged from palest white to deepest brown, the one constant that identified them as a member of the tribe. When Viktor had been born, twenty five years ago, with his silver hair and his icy blue eyes, the townspeople had called him the spawn of a demon, and had accused his mother of witchcraft, and of lying with the devil.

His father had left, unable to bear the shame, disappearing over the horizon without a backward glance. His mother had lived, and had loved him with her whole being until he was fifteen years old. Then she had died of a wasting sickness, being drawn away from life slowly until she was gone, and Viktor was alone.

He had taught himself to hunt from an early age, as his mother relied on him for food, and had proved extremely gifted. When the other hunters came back with a lone rabbit, Viktor always returned with a deer, or a brace of fat, slow witted pheasants decked out in bright feathers. The other hunters, jealous of his prowess, had taken this as further evidence of his unnatural providence, and had shunned him more virulently, even though what Viktor and his mother didn't eat was always given to the town store.

Viktor had never stopped trying to be accepted, never stopped feeling the ache of rejection whenever the villagers spat at him in the street, or warded off the evil eye in his presence. His mother's presence had been a balm to his young soul, before he was old enough to understand why he was not the same as the other children.

 _"You're special, Vitya,_ " his mother would hum as she brushed his long hair every night, _"You are destined for great things. One day, your destiny will find you."_

He had smiled, because he wanted it to be true, and he had cried, because he knew that it wasn't. And then she was gone, and there were no more comforting words, no one to hold him as he cried, no one to wipe the blood from his face after he was beaten (yet again) by the other boys.

The day his mother died, Viktor had sheathed his heart in ice. As time went by, he grew strong, taller than anyone else, and learned to revel in his aloneness, and to utilise the villager's fear of him.

One day, one of the worst offenders, a man named Olik, spat in Viktor's face as he walked past him, jeering "Now your slut of a mother is gone, no one will defend you eh? Devil's-spawn!"

Viktor had glared at the man, wiping the saliva off his cheek, and had hissed some indistinct and vitriolic words under his breath without breaking eye contact. Olik, fearing what the witch-child might do to him, had fled.

For the next week, Viktor had followed Olik whenever he went to The Forest to hunt. Silently Viktor crept through the perpetual shadows, scaring away rabbits and deer before Olik could approach them; every day, he would return empty handed and fearful, wondering whether this was as a result of his mocking of the witch-child, and whether he would ever hunt again.

At the end of a week, Viktor desisted, allowing the man to hunt undisturbed. Olik had told the other villagers of the 'curse', and, fearful for their families, they had mutually agreed that it was safest to leave Viktor alone from that point onwards.

So the beatings had stopped, and Viktor had been left utterly, completely alone. In many ways it was an improvement, but as time wore on, he began to feel his isolation as a corrosive hole in his heart, growing more virulent with time. He even considered leaving the village to their fate, and looking beyond the horizon for a new home as his father had; but the only memories of his mother resided here, in his small house, and without his skill with a bow the villagers would probably starve come the winter. Viktor couldn't find it in his heart to wish that on them ( _however much they might deserve it_ , he thought).

Viktor stood, stretched, and threw on some of his few garments, moss green leggings and a dark blue tunic, before braiding his hair and draping a thick fur about his shoulders. Looking around the room, his eyes taking in the spartan furnishings, Viktor caught sight of the hunting clothes he had discarded the night before, stiff with blood and grime. He carried them out to the back of the house, and began to methodically scrape the worst of the dirt off them, rinsing them in the clear pool every few minutes.

When he finished, Viktor hung them over the fire that burned in one corner of the room to dry, and sat down at the small table to plan his next expedition.

It was coming up to the coldest part of the year, what the villagers called the Dead Moon. For one month every winter, the cold descended like a hammer blow; no animal seemed to venture anywhere near the village, trees froze solid, their sap expanding to split them in two as though struck by an axe, and if it weren't for Viktor the village might have starved.

Viktor planned to spend the next week hunting nightly, stocking the village with as much meat as he could catch, in order to stave off the hunger that the Dead Moon brought with it. Last night had been incredibly lucky, he knew; he had expected to find a few rabbits at most, and instead had found a huge stag practically waiting for him, which would provide for a large family for a week.

Now that the Dead Moon was drawing closer, Viktor had decided to put into action the plan that he had been pondering for some months, never sure whether the risk was equal to the reward. The villagers never ventured deep into The Forest, which seemed hostile to them, and Viktor was the only one to make it to the Cut and back unscathed, seemingly always in the right place at the right time. Tonight, however, Viktor was planning to venture deeper into the heart of The Forest than he ever had before, past the Cut and into the deep woods beyond. He had been watching the deer herds tracks for some time, and he had noticed that any time the deer fled from an inept hunter, or occasionally from Viktor himself, they always headed in one direction; north, towards where the woods grew thick and the ground grew treacherous for humans.

Tonight, Viktor had decided to follow them. If he could find where the deer slept, he could return each night, and by the time the cold arrived in force he would have stored enough to keep the entire village full for the entire duration of the Dead Moon. He reached for some rough paper he had pressed himself out of willow tree pulp, and for a slender stick that had only partially burned in the fire.

Viktor began to sketch, drawing from the infallible map in his head the direction he would take that evening, marking reference points and paths, in order to guide him if he should get lost in the dark woods.

When he had finished, Viktor rolled up the map and stored it in his hunting belt. Then he cleaned his knives and bow twice, oiled a new bow string, and sat down to fletch some more arrows just in case. The mindless and familiar activities calmed the sense of unease that lay like a thick fog in the back of Viktor's mind ( _there must be a reason no human has ever survived the deep woods_ , his unconscious thoughts murmured).

Finished with all his preparations, Viktor ate bread and cold meat, drank from the mountain stream, and lay back down to sleep until dusk, his mind still humming with tension like a taut bow string. Eventually, the exhaustion he still felt from the previous night's activities settled heavily into his bones, and he slept.

oooooooooooo

When Viktor emerged from his house at dusk, he was again dressed in the plaited leather hunting clothes, his bow slung across his back and his braided hair swinging hypnotically, like a pendulum, in the frigid breeze. He made his way to the edge of The Forest, and taking a deep breath, plunged into the shadow of the trees, where his retreating form was quickly lost from sight.

After an hour of silent stalking through the steadily darkening forest, Viktor came to the Cut. This was where, he knew, he would have to decide whether to press on with his plan, or to give up and try and find something nearer the edge of The Forest, and safety.

Lifting his chin defiantly, Viktor thought of the children who had not yet learned to fear him from their parents, and their pinched faces when the Dead Moon hit and they didn't have enough food stored.

With this image swimming before him in the darkness, Viktor paced back a few feet, and then ran forwards, his lithe muscles bunching beneath him as he leapt across the narrow gorge (trying very hard not to look at the ground that yawned in a chasm beneath him). His flight lasted a few seconds, and then was over, as he hit the ground on the other side and rolled, his finely oiled bow collecting a coating of dust.

As Viktor stood, warily glancing about him in the unfamiliar territory, it seemed to him that the air on this side of the Cut was richer, deeper, more complete in its darkness. He felt horribly out of place, an invader into a land which was not his, and which could expel him with brief and violent finality in an instant. There was very little noise, the darkness seeming like a vacuum which swallowed sound before it could go more than a few feet.  
Viktor looked around him, orienting himself by his internal compass. As he looked at the dark earth covered with the detritus of trees, he saw what he had been hoping for. _Hoof-prints_! he thought excitedly, pacing forward and tracing them with his experienced hands. He though that the prints could be no more than an hour old, and judging by the way the ground was churned and distorted, a whole herd of deer had passed this way.

Excitement thudding in his veins, Viktor felt the last of his unreasoning fear leave him, and he began to follow the prints deeper into The Forest.

Behind him, and unheard, there followed the soft tread of broad, padded feet, and quiet, panting breaths.

After another three hours of flitting silently from tree to tree, Viktor came to the edge of a small clearing, and saw at once that this was what he had been searching for. About twenty six deer stood or lay in the clearing, and from where he stood hidden behind a tree, Viktor could see one particularly impressive young stag that lay twenty feet from him, with its eyes closed.

Silently, Viktor drew an arrow from the quiver on his back, and silently he fitted it to the string. Breathing in slowly through his nose, his lifted the arrow, and sighted along his outstretched arm. It would be an easy shot, and the stag would die painlessly, sleeping as it was.

Before Viktor could loose the arrow, the quiet darkness behind him was rent by a violent snarl. The deer woke up instantly, and were gone in a moment, with only the sound of their thundering hooves remaining, before it too disappeared into the underbrush.

Viktor spun on the ball of his foot, and came face to face with an image which haunted the nightmares of every hunter in The Forest.

Before him, emerging from between two of the darkened trees, paced an old, grizzled grey wolf, teeth bared in a vicious and now silent snarl. One of its eyes was missing, a mass of scar tissue filling the empty socket, and saliva hung in ropes from its teeth; it was lean, and obviously starving. _And here I am_ , thought Viktor, his heart sinking, _prey that walked right into its territory._ His pulse thundered in his ears, fear pooling like acid in his stomach, the realisation that this might be his last hunt sinking slowly into his bones. The wolf looked half mad with hunger, and Viktor knew that this would be a fight to the death, for both of them.

Viktor still held his bow, the arrow nocked and ready. He lifted the bow, sighted along his arm, and loosed; but at the exact moment he let go, the wolf let forth an ear splitting howl, the wood around Viktor reverberating with the force of it. The arrow flew off course, and before Viktor had had time to do more than incoherently shout in terror, the wolf had cleared the space between them with one bound.

Viktor felt the white hot pain of teeth at his neck, and then his head struck the iron hard bole of an ancient tree, and he knew no more.

ooooooooooooo

Yuuri was lying on the topmost branch of the First Tree, his back balanced against the lichen covered trunk, and his legs stretched out along the branch itself. He was thinking.

It had been a long time since Yuuri had had to think of much more than the rhythms of the forest, or the celestial dance of the heavens above him as the stars and planets whirled their way through the night sky. He did not often find something puzzling; as he had sprung from the heart of the forest, the forest itself held no secrets from him. The last time he could remember that he had felt such a dizzying array of emotions was the time he had seen the ancient hunters breaking and burning, slashing their way through the wood in search of ever more food.

Yuuri closed his eyes against the sight of the rose pink sky and sighed, the sound lost in the still air high above the forest canopy. _Humans_ , he thought, _are more trouble than they ought to be, given that they live for no more than a few breaths_.

In the distance, Yuuri heard a wolf howling, singing of its loneliness and terror and hunger. He frowned; though he did not, as a rule, interfere in the patterns of life and death, predator and prey in his forest, this animal sounded half-mad with pain and hunger.

Resolving to go and look for it when it got dark, and help it if it could be helped, Yuuri opened his eyes again, and stared up at the endless expanse of the sky above him. The stars, more numerous than he could ever count, were spread out across the heavens like a careless scattering of sand, each of the millions of pinpricks of light seeming to Yuuri like an old friend. It was a cloudless night, a full moon; Yuuri could feel the cold, the real cold, approaching through the darkening air. It would be another half moon, he thought, before it arrived, and then even the humans wouldn't venture abroad in the forest, their fragile bodies too vulnerable to the freezing air.

And with this thought, Yuuri's thoughts resumed the well-worn track they had run on since he had left the edge of the forest that morning, when the hunter with the silver hair had shut his door against the dawn. _Who was he? Why is he so different from other humans, who come and go like leaves on a tree?_

Yuuri pictured the man's naked body as he had seen it last night, cold and beautiful under the dark sky, reflecting the faint starlight and intensifying it in his glowing skin. He remembered the heavy fall of his hair, sticking to the muscles in his back, and something in his stomach heated at the thought, a flash fire briefly burning across his skin.

He remembered the pearlescent moonglow of the hunter's spirit, spread throughout his body so gently, so unlike the harshly burning spirits of the other humans, and that was the most puzzling thing of all.

Yuuri had thought of nothing else since he had seen him, seeing only the white shape of his body behind his closed lids when he tried to rest, hearing only the soft sighing of his footsteps as he tried to listen to the usual sounds of the forest at dusk. It had been so long since anything new had happened, so long since anything had really _changed_ in the ancient forest, that Yuuri couldn't tear his mind away from this new mystery.

The desperate howl of the wolf split the air again, and, sighing, Yuuri stood up lithely, balancing on the branch as easily as though he stood on solid ground.

He leapt down, from branch to branch, sometimes falling twenty feet before landing lightly on his feet on the next wide bough, until he reached the deep tangled carpet of roots at the base of the clearing.

Pausing only to inspect how the family of foxes that lived directly underneath the tree were faring (very well, they said, considering the Big Cold was on its way), Yuuri set out to find the lonely wolf. He leapt from tree trunk to tree trunk, coming down to the forest floor only occasionally to inspect a print or sniff the air. The wolf had been silent for two hours or so before Yuuri caught its scent, near the Cut. When he finally found it, he froze, his limbs locking into place in shock, assessing the scent tapestry that appeared to his mind as broad swathes of colour in the dark night air.

Across the Cut, where no human had ever trodden, there stood the scent of the hunter from last night, as clearly as though he had been standing there moments before. His scent was bright, excited, light blue, and tinged with a small amount of electric yellow fear ( _no doubt due to the fact he was in unfamiliar territory_ , thought Yuuri). Painted across his scent, coloured a diseased green with madness and hunger, ran the wolf's scent, crossing the hunter's at the point he had landed. And then, as the hunter's scent disappeared in a broad blue stripe between the trees, the wolf's scent changed, dripping with the dark, burnt blood-red of bloodlust, and began to mingle with the hunter's as it followed him.

Yuuri's heart began to race, and he didn't know why. He had never even spoken to this hunter, but there was fear pooling in his heart and electrifying his pulse. The single thought that beat in his brain as his feet began to move, leaping up into the treetops and hurling his body as fast as he could through the dark forest parallel to the scent trail, was _not him. Not him. Please, not him_.

As Yuuri followed the trail, the wolf's scent never leaving the tracks of the hunter for more than a few feet, he saw the scent getting brighter, stronger, and knew that he was close. When he saw the spots of drool drying on the ground over the wolf's bloody trail, he knew that he was minutes, if not seconds away now.

But before he could break the cover of the trees, ( _near the clearing that some of the deer slept in_ , he remembered) he heard a guttural snarl, a few seconds of silence, then the twang of a bowstring heralded a vicious, maddeningly loud howl.

As Yuuri broke through the trees, he was in time to see the wolf leap at the hunter, its teeth bared, and sink them into his should and neck.

Yuuri did not hesitate. Focussing on the flickering light that he saw in the wolf's starved body, he inhaled, and then blew hard, with his body as well as his mind, dissipating the light of the wolf's spirit onto the night air, where it quickly faded away.

Yuuri leapt forwards, landing lightly next to the hunter, and pulled the now dead wolf away from him. He lowered the hunter to the floor, cradling him gently in his arms, and pulled the edge of the leather tunic away from the wound.

Yuuri breathed in sharply when he saw the damage. There was a lot of blood, the wolf's teeth having torn the large muscles in the hunter's shoulder, but miraculously none of the arteries in his neck had been severed. The hunter's silver hair was stained bright red, sticking in the wood, and Yuuri pulled it back to bare the ruined flesh. The soft glow of the hunter's spirit was still present, still whole, though it had begun to flicker slightly, as though in a slight breeze.

Yuuri had done this before, when animals had been injured and he had wanted to save them. However, he had never tried it with a human.

He closed his eyes, shutting out the forest, and allowed his mind to see only the light of each life as it appeared around him. He saw his own intensely blazing pale green spirit, filling his skin like a caged sun. He saw the now rapidly-flickering spirit of the hunter, as it flowed with the blood pooling underneath his body. He breathed in slowly through his nose, and when he exhaled, Yuuri pushed an infinitesimally small fraction of the light from his hand into the hunter, watching as the pale green assimilated and became the same opalescent shade as the hunter's. The flickering slowed drastically, and Yuuri opened his eyes, knowing that the hunter would now survive at least a few more hours.

He pulled the man on to his shoulders, taking care to keep his wound untouched, and began to run swiftly through the forest, the weight meaning no more to him than a bird on the branch of a tree.

As he ran, he thought. Yuuri had never been able to tell what the strange things he could do with the light of life (which every creature, not matter how tiny, had within it) were. He had always been able to save those animals which needed saving (such as the mother bear with two new cubs, which had been caught in a cruel spiked iron trap near the edge of the forest; Yuuri had healed her, and now her descendants lived on near the mountains), but he had never used the power to kill before. He was not disgusted at what he had done; the wolf had been very old and in pain, but more importantly, he had clearly been rejected from his pack, which to a wolf meant madness and death.

He had never used this power on a human before. He thought it didn't work as well as it ought to have done; maybe it was because the humans were not part of the forest, and therefore were not part of him.

Within an hour, Yuuri had reached the clearing and the First Tree. He clambered swiftly and deftly over the branches, finally reaching his destination; the wide, open circular space from which he himself had sprung so many years ago, still open and pale, the heartwood of the tree.

Yuuri place the hunter down on the soft bed of moss that grew across the floor of the heartwood, and efficiently removed the shredded leather from his damaged torso. As he did so, in a distant part of his brain, Yuuri wondered what on earth he was doing; this was a human, one of the creatures that broke and tore the forest and Yuuri surely ought to let him die. But even as he thought this, he continued working over the wound, cleaning it with herbs that he drew from the pockets in his silver furs, and occasionally jumping down to the roots of the tree to pick a few leaves from the plants there.

Having done all he could for the moment, Yuuri covered the hunter in a soft pelt, leaving only his face exposed. He stepped away, his hands covered in blood and his mind racing.

What was he going to do now? The hunter would probably survive; his ministrations had seen to that. His spirit no longer flickered, having returned to the steady all pervasive glow it had been the night before, if a little weaker. But Yuuri couldn't find it in himself to carry the man to the edge of the wood and leave him there to be found; if the man didn't freeze to death, he might be attacked again, the wolves seeing him as an easy target.

Yuuri studied the unconscious man's face. His eyes, now that they were shut, showed pale eyelids patterned with fine blue veins. His forehead was wide and pale, unmarked; his lips were slightly open as he breathed slowly though his mouth, the sound a soft, regular rhythm in counterpoint to Yuuri's own racing heartbeat. The corners of his eyes were prematurely lined, their deeply carved edges seeming to speak of tragedy and loss; his chin, slightly pointed, jutted out at an angle which showed that this tragedy had not defeated him.

Yuuri thought that the hunter may be the most beautiful creature he had ever seen. He sat down next to the man as he slept, and took the long braid of hair between his fingers, removing the tie and deftly unbraiding it, feeling the soft coils fall through his fingers, matted here and there by blood.

Yuuri felt something in his heart clench at the sight of the silver overlaid with scarlet, this tangible evidence of how close the man had come to an agonising death. He spread the man's hair over the pillow of moss that he lay on, the silver against the deep living green, and moved across to the other side of the room, sitting cross legged and leaning against the wall.

Yuuri took one last look at the man's sleeping face, and heard his regular heartbeat echoing around the small wooden chamber, a reassuring evidence of life.

Closing his eyes, Yuuri drifted into his thoughts; he had never been able to sleep, but this lucid wandering through his memories was as close as he could come to it.

The man's heartbeat sounded in his ears as he dreamed.


	3. The First Tree

Viktor dreamed of pain, and blood, and darkness. He wandered for what seemed like days in and out of waking hallucinations and nightmares, until finally on the fourth day his fever broke and he slept naturally, dreaming of nothing at all.

On the fifth morning, Viktor opened his eyes. He blinked slowly, looking at a low, pale wooden ceiling, and wondering in a detached sort of way if he was still asleep. He moved to roll off his heather mattress, and hissed; his shoulder was a blaze of pain, extending from his left pectoral up to the base of his neck. It all came flooding back; the jump across the Cut, the tracking, the deer…

 _The wolf_ , he thought, his mind pulsing with terror, scrambling to sit up.

"Don't move," spoke a soft and clear voice from a few feet away.

Viktor froze, his muscles locking together in shock.

He didn't recognise the voice of whoever was speaking; it seemed to contain thunderstorms and soft rain, was as hard as ice and as soft as spring sunlight. Turning his head as little as he could, Viktor looked up at the speaker.

The first thing Viktor noticed was that he was in a circular room, with a shallow dome overhead and a mossy floor which cast a green glow through the air, all in a pale wood ringed like the heart of a tree. And sitting opposite him, the only other person in sight, was the figure who must have spoken.

Viktor blinked once in surprise. The man was young, with pale, unblemished skin and dark hair that brushed into his eyes and stopped at the nape of his neck. He wore a tunic of silver furs which left his legs and feet bare below the knee. His skin was startlingly white.

Viktor raised his eyes to the stranger's face, and met his eyes, which were fixed on his own. He felt his heart beat faster. They were dark, and they were beautiful; they seemed to convey a great age, at odds with the young man's face and body. They were widely set in a rounded face, which was lightly dusted with freckles which radiated out from a short, straight nose over a rosy, sensitive mouth.

Viktor observed all this in the moment it took him to become afraid. He didn't know where he was, and this stranger was like nothing he had ever seen before; he didn't seem quite human, and Viktor wondered if he had run into one of the evil spirits that were said to haunt the deepest recesses of The Forest, feasting on evil dreams and fear.

"Don't be afraid," said the stranger, seeming to read the terror in Viktor's eyes.

The stranger leaned forwards (Viktor instinctively flinched back), and the stranger paused; but then he reached determined and gentle hands under Viktor's prone back, helping him to sit until he was leaning against the wall of the circular chamber. His hands, Viktor noticed, were as cool as though he had been holding them in a mountain stream.

When they were sitting opposite each other, the stranger continued staring intently into Viktor's eyes (which caused a sensation that wasn't quite fear to run down his spine). Viktor saw a myriad of thoughts flashing across the inhumanly deep eyes that were locked on to his, and then the stranger seemed to make a decision.

"What is your name?" he asked, his soft voice falling into Viktor's ears like a spring shower.

Viktor hesitated, struck again by the tones that lay woven into the stranger's voice that went beyond human speech. He wondered if this being was going to ensnare his senses and then bind his spirit to wander the forest for all eternity, as in the stories he had been told as a child. But human or not, this man had been gentle, and if he had wished to cause him harm Viktor was sure he would never have woken up after the wolf attacked.

Certainty formed in Viktor's mind, overruling the wariness that still caused his skin to prickle as though with a presentiment of lightning.

"My name is Viktor," he said quietly, matching the volume of the stranger, allowing his voice to sink into the mossy floor of the chamber. Something about this room seemed to prohibit unnecessary speech, as though the silence was too precious to break needlessly.

The stranger nodded as though Viktor had simply been confirming something he already knew.

"My name is Yuuri," he said, "and I am the heart of the forest".

Yuuri had waited for five days for the stranger's eyes to finally open. An infection had set into the wound, despite Yuuri's best efforts, and the man had spent four days beset by waking and sleeping nightmares before the fever had finally broken and he had begun to sleep peacefully.

Yuuri's mind had been whirling with the possibility of simply running out of the tree, fleeing and allowing the man to leave on his own without a word exchanged; but this had been quickly abandoned. The man was still too weak, and he wouldn't know the way to the edge of the forest even if he did survive the journey.

When the stranger had opened his eyes, relief had flooded through Yuuri's veins, followed immediately by an undignified panic. He had saved the man's life, but now for the first time in Yuuri's existence, he would be speaking to one of the strange, violent, spirited humans that he had silently watched for thousands of years; the idea filled him with dread and a strange excitement that felt a little like hunger.

The strange feeling blossoming in the pit of his stomach, Yuuri watched the play of emotions on the man's face as he stared up at the pale wooden ceiling, and then clearly noticed that he was in a strange room. He panicked, the terror evident in his flared nostrils and tense jaw, and tried to sit, huffing in pain as Yuuri saw the wound on his shoulder stretch.

"Don't move." Yuuri said.

As Yuuri reached across the space between them, the man flinched, and something inside Yuuri's heart recoiled. He finally allowed Yuuri to help him, and the smooth skin of his back seemed very warm as Yuuri lifted him gently into a sitting position.

Yuuri, unable to bear the intensity of their locked gazes, asked the stranger's name; Viktor, he had said, his voice as soft as, though much lower than Yuuri's own. It fitted him so completely that Yuuri had nodded in acknowledgement.

And now, the stranger was sitting there looking at him with piercing blue eyes, his nakedness covered only by a fir that covered him from the waist down and his hair.

The two of them sat in the heartwood of the tree, conversation apparently at something of an impasse now that the formal introductions were over. Viktor thought that he must have finally gone made, driven into insanity by his desire for company to the extent that he had invented this beautiful stranger with the ancient eyes. Yuuri didn't know what to say to this man who he had nursed every minute of the last five days, whom he had seen naked and dripping in the starlight, and who had filled his every waking thought since that moment.

Eventually, the silence became so present in the room that it seemed to coalesce into a solid, awkward third presence.

Viktor felt compelled to break it.

"I suppose I've gone mad, then." he said, not sounding particularly distressed by this, his low voice untroubled, and Yuuri thought that his speech sounded more like singing than the other humans he had heard, the intonation ranging up and down freely.

Yuuri eyed him warily, a question in his dark eyes, unsure of how to reply; he had not realised that the human's mind might have been affected by the injury.

Viktor rolled his eyes, apparently no longer intimidated as long as he was sure the man opposite him was a figment of his imagination.

"You've just introduced yourself as the heart of the forest, which as far as I know, is just a point on the map. And here I am in this…is it a room..? with you, a beautiful stranger," Viktor sighed deeply, wincing as it stretched the wound on his neck. "Maybe the wolf was rabid, and this is my final hallucination before I die of thirst. Is it? And where am I?"

Yuuri looked at the stranger, unsure of the meaning behind his stream of words and questions, and decided to answer only the last.

"You are in the First Tree, the white pine in the centre of the forest."

Viktor looked around him with interest, still apparently unphased by this further evidence of his departure from reason. He assumed that really he was lying in some dank puddle in the forest, and that his mind was conjuring up pleasant fantasies.

Shuffling closer to where the room opened outwards into empty air, watched by the dark eyes of the stranger ( _Yuuri_ , he told himself, _his name is Yuuri_ ) Viktor peered out of the opening, blinked once, and then immediately scooted backwards with a shout of panic.

Viktor leaned back against the reassuringly solid wall of the chamber, his heart pounding. As he had peered out of the entrance, he had seen the ground, forty feet below, covered in a mass of tangled roots, and seen branches as long as his entire village spreading out below him in a complex web. He now knew that he wasn't hallucinating; his imagination couldn't conjure up that sickening sensation of _height_.

Yuuri smiled slightly, amused at how Viktor's elegance seemed to have deserted him over such a small matter as a forty foot drop.

Viktor turned wide, terror struck eyes on him, his face frozen in an expression of horror; if this wasn't a hallucination, then that meant that what Yuuri had told him was true, and he was now trapped in a small room with no way down (except a fatal one), with the spirit of the forest. His mind fractured with the effort of comprehending what was happening, and simply whirred with fear, pushed beyond its limits.

Yuuri was struck by the sudden realisation that perhaps it wasn't normal for humans to wake from a deathly illness forty feet above the ground and attended by a spirit.

In an attempt to alleviate the man's panic, he began to explain in a low, soothing voice, just as he did when a trapped animal snarled and lashed at him with claws and teeth, letting his words fall softly into the air and calm Viktor's frantic heartbeat. Yuuri told of his waking as a thought in the heart of the tree, and the day that he had stepped out of the heartwood that they now sat in, the embodiment of the forest and greatest tree. Viktor's eyes widened, fascinated, as Yuuri continued to talk, telling of days spent running with deer, and creeping along the forest floor with the ants that built cities underground.

He told Viktor of how he had heard the mad wolf, how he had come to find it, and how he had carried Viktor to this tree to heal; but Yuuri did not mention how he had followed out of fear for Viktor, and how he had watched him the night he bathed in the dark.

When Yuuri finished speaking, the final syllables fading in the moss-sweetened air, Viktor sat spellbound for a few moments.

"Thank you, Yuuri," he said quietly, "Thank you for saving me. I do not know how I can ever repay you."

Yuuri cocked his head, thinking, his dark hair brushing against his forehead, and quirked his lips thoughtfully. What could this human do for him? What could an immortal spirit want from such a frail and brief creature? Then he remembered. He remembered the songs of the first humans, the companionship they shared, the baffling rituals he had watched from a distance and never been able to comprehend.

So Yuuri spoke again. "Tell me… Tell me what it is to be human. I want to know…" his voice trailed off briefly, and he met Viktor's eyes again, "everything."

And so Viktor in his turn told his story. Of being born cursed with his differences from the rest of the tribe, of growing up with his mother, and the love that she had given him. Then her death, and the pain of learning to live alone. Viktor skipped over the beatings, the senseless violence and hatred he had faced, and instead told of what it was like to hunt in the forest on a fine summer day, the feeling of providing for those who would otherwise starve, and the pleasure he gained from fishing in his small stream. Viktor told of songs around a campfire at dusk, and related the history of his people; coming from a far away land across the water, and settling by The Forest which had given them life, never again departing from their small settlement.

Yuuri listened gravely, the mysteries of humans partially opening to him. Though Viktor did not explain everything he wanted to know, he was loathe to interrupt the singing cadence of his voice as he spoke. When Viktor finally fell silent, his throat was parched and his voice rough, and the pain of his shoulder wound was beginning to trouble him again.

Yuuri handed him a wooden ladle full of water; Viktor recognised it as coming from his own hunting belt, and drank gratefully.

"Lie down," Yuuri said quietly, "And sleep. We can talk more when you wake, if you like."

Viktor's eyes closed, his exhaustion overcoming him, and he nodded. He felt that with Yuuri watching over him, no harm could come to him here, and the knot of tension he had felt within his heart since waking unravelled.

Within moments he was asleep, deep in the heart of the First Tree.

ooooooooooooo

And so it continued for three days. Viktor would wake, Yuuri would press herbs into the rapidly diminishing wound on his shoulder (so rapidly diminishing that Viktor was sure that some magic in the tree was helping him to heal), and they would talk.

Yuuri had a voracious appetite for stories of Viktor's life, the smallest details such as the songs the villagers sang round the campfire and what Viktor remembered of his mother seeming to fascinate him. Viktor, now that he had managed to mentally assimilate the knowledge that the rumoured spirit within the trees was in fact real (and kind, and gentle, and _beautiful_ ) wanted to know everything about the forest that he had spent so much of his time in.

Yuuri told him of how the seasons seemed to him to flash past in moments, and how the animals slept beneath the snow waiting for the return of the sun; he told him of his interest when he first saw humans, and his rage at their desecration of the forest. Viktor wondered at the millennia that Yuuri had lived, trying to wrap his brain around that much _time_.

Every night, Viktor would lie down to sleep on the moss that was softer than his heather mattress, and Yuuri would sit cross legged on the other side of the small heartwood chamber. Viktor would sleep, and Yuuri would watch over him, reliving their conversations and thinking of questions for the next day.

From the moment Yuuri had told him his story, the ice around Viktor's heart had begun to melt, as he revelled in the company of another being ( _not quite another human, but what did that matter_ , he told himself) who did not recoil at the sight of him.

And Yuuri, who had wondered for so many centuries what it might be like to sit by the fire with the humans he had seen, exchanging stories and singing quiet songs, felt his pleasure in his solitude crack under the gentle pressure of Viktor's smile, revealing how empty his days had been, and how starved his heart. Though the forest was alive, and it spoke to Yuuri in its own way, it was not the same as this easy companionship; it did not have a heart shaped smile or ice blue eyes that gentled as Viktor spoke of his childhood and his only happy memories.

As Viktor began feeling stronger, Yuuri allowed him to leave the chamber for short periods of time. With Yuuri's steadying hand on his shoulder, ready to catch him if he should lose his footing, Viktor climbed into the higher branches of the First Tree, his muscles shaking from lack of use.

With his back to the lichen-covered trunk, Viktor would stretch his legs along the branch and look out over the forest canopy. Yuuri would sit by him, the branch easily supporting them both, their hands touching, as they watched the sun rise or set, sometimes talking, sometimes listening to the sounds of the forest in easy silence. Their breath steamed in the cold air, and Yuuri covered them both with silver furs; though he had no need of the extra warmth, he liked to see the faint flush high on Viktor's cheekbones as Yuuri wrapped the soft pelt around him.

Yuuri found he could make Viktor laugh by asking him questions about the most basic things that humans did, such as why he ate or drank. Viktor would spend hours trying to provoke the warm smile that, for Yuuri, was the equivalent of laughter, asking him to tell stories of the foolish black squirrels that gossiped around them in the branches.

Their moments of eye contact grew longer, the touch of their hands more firm, as they sat high above the world, baring their souls to each other, and feeling for the first time the warmth of companionship.

And though neither would name it, they were falling deeper and deeper in love with every passing day.

By the fifth morning, Viktor's shoulder no longer troubled him, and he began to think of leaving the tree and returning to the village. Loathe as he was to leave, he knew that people depended on him for their food, and Yuuri had informed him that he now only had fourteen nights before the Dead Moon arrived, and with it the hungry weeks of winter.

Yuuri's heart sank when Viktor said he would be leaving. He had known it was coming; the wound was healed, and Viktor had told him of how the young ones in the village would suffer if he did not provide them with enough to eat in the frozen weeks ahead.

Viktor returned his possessions to his pack, and Yuuri gave him a fur tunic like his own to replace the shredded leather that had been mangled by the wolf bite.

The two of them climbed down the tree in silence, the air heavy with the sadness of parting, Yuuri always one step below Viktor in order to catch him if necessary.

Finally, they stood between two enormous tangled roots at the bottom of the white pine, facing each other a few feet apart. The winter sunlight slanted through the canopy above them, tinted richly by the evergreen foliage of the pine, colouring their skin with green and gold.

Neither of them seemed to know how to begin to say goodbye. Yuuri stood, his hands clasped behind his back, feeling more human than he ever had done; his heart felt like a lead weight in his chest. These stolen few days of companionship were already dwindling behind him, and endless, empty time stretched ahead, lonely and purposeless.

Viktor felt his heart begin to break as he thought of the welcome that awaited him in the village, the necessary evil of his return. He looked at Yuuri's downcast eyes, and felt the resolve which had been building in his mind ever since they had sat together above the sunset talking of nothing in particular harden and set.

Taking one pace forward, Viktor said "Yuuri."

His low voice vibrated across the air between them, and Yuuri looked up, his black hair falling into his eyes. Viktor was horrified to see a hint of wetness caught in his eyelashes.

Before his resolve could weaken, Viktor placed his hand under Yuuri's chin, his long, strong fingers tilting his face upwards, and stepped forward, closing the gap that remained between them.

His breath coming faster, Viktor felt the pulse in Yuuri's neck quicken and he looked deep into his eyes, blue into black, and leaned forward.

Their lips touched, gently, politely, Viktor's warm mouth covering Yuuri's cool lips for a moment before drawing back.

Viktor's eyes looked questioningly into Yuuri's, as though asking permission, or forgiveness, and withdrew his hand from Yuuri's face.

Yuuri had never felt anything like this before. His heart was thrumming with the speed of a hummingbird's wings, his blood singing in his veins, warmth blossoming outwards from where Viktor's lips had brushed his own.

There was a moment of silence. Then, closing the gap between them once more, Yuuri locked his hands behind Viktor's neck, and kissed him back, not politely or gently, but with three thousand years of solitude and passion that had been locked in his heart until this moment. Viktor gasped against Yuuri's lips, and brought his arms up, holding Yuuri against him in a crushing grip, pushing them backwards until they leaned against the smooth bark of the ancient tree, shielded on either side by the tangled roots. Where the planes of their bodies met, they burned, a flash fire running across their skin in electric waves from the point of contact; when Yuuri's back hit the lichen padded trunk, he moaned softly, the noise vibrating through his lips and into Viktor's.

Yuuri felt Viktor's mouth open slightly against his own, and deepened the kiss, the heat radiating from their bodies intensifying until they melted together into one being, hungry for more, desperate to feel every line of the their bodies meet and meld. Viktor breathed Yuuri's name in a brief moment of separation, and the sound of it was like a prayer.

Then they slowed, gentled, the fire no longer flashing across their skin but smouldering deep in their cores, their lips no longer bruising but tender.

After what felt like several sunlit hours, they broke apart, breathing heavily, and Viktor leaned his forehead against Yuuri's.

Yuuri's eyes were wide, his pupils dilated, and his hair swept back from his face where Viktor had gripped it in passion. His lips were pink, kiss-bruised; Viktor could feel the flush high on his own cheekbones, and knew that he must be a mirror image of Yuuri.

Their eyes locked together, and Viktor looked into the black irises he had come to know so well, now turbulent with emotion.

"I will come back," Viktor stated, and it was spoken with the force of a vow, each word falling into the cold air like a pebble dropped into a still lake, the ripples running together until the force of his statement reverberated in every corner of Yuuri's mind, leaving no room for doubt.

Before Yuuri could speak, Viktor had turned on his heel, walking away straight backed and disappearing in between the trees at the edge of the clearing, following the instructions that Yuuri had given him the previous day.

Yuuri raised a pale hand to his lips, touching them briefly, recalling the warmth that was already fading, and smiled through the tears that were slowly forming in his dark eyes. He ran a few feet, leapt into the branches of the white pine, and was lost from view.

Viktor, winding through the bright forest, paused and gripped the trunk of an ancient larch tree, the rough bark against his palm distracting him from the pain that radiated outwards from his heart. His eyes closed, and he hunched over, his straight backed posture folding in on itself. For a moment, he stood bent like an old willow; but then the memory of Yuuri's body against his own, his lips parting against Viktor's, came to him, and he touched his lips softly, heart warmed by the memory of how Yuuri had kissed him that second time.

He straightened again, and now walking with renewed purpose, threaded between tree trunks until he came to the edge of the wood, the weak sunlight seeming harsh and brittle after the deep shade of the forest.

Viktor paused at the border between the wood and the path that lead down to the village. Even at this distance, he could see smoke rising from the houses. He didn't know what kind of reception he was going to get; would they have even noticed he was gone? Would they be furious he hadn't managed to bring back any food?

Squaring his shoulders and ignoring the trepidation in his heart, Viktor stepped forward, out of the shade of the trees and into the sunlight, his silver hair glittering as he turned his steps towards the village that no longer felt like home.


	4. The Fire

Alone in his small wooden house, which felt a lot smaller now that he knew what it was to sit in the clear air high above the world, Viktor brooded. The fire hissed and spat in the small grate, pine logs popping, and the flickering light threw Viktor's pale features into sharp relief, the black shadows crawling over his face as the flames danced.

It had been two weeks since the morning of his return to the village. The villagers had been hostile and suspicious, wondering how any human could survive for that long in the treacherous wood. They had muttered among themselves that Viktor must have been practicing dark magic, and that the dark spirits of the trees must have given him the strange furs that he now wore daily.

Whispers had run like a virus from house to house, and although there had not yet been any open violence against Viktor, he could feel the tension in the air whenever he walked past a group of people in the main street; he heard it in the hastily stifled conversations, and saw it in narrowed eyes and the fearful clenching of fists.

He was used to the suspicion and the simmering threat of violence, and it didn't hurt him any more than it usually did, just another scratch on a perpetually-open wound. More than anything else, Viktor missed Yuuri. The silence in his home, once so peaceful, now became oppressive, lying heavy and smothering over his heart. His carefully constructed routines, the barrier he had built around himself, and the studied indifference to company that he practiced every day had come crashing down, leaving Viktor dazed and blinking from the shock, newly exposed and vulnerable.

All Viktor could see when he closed his eyes was Yuuri's enigmatic smile, and the moonlight reflected in his dark hair in diffuse streaks of silver. As the weather grew steadily colder, day by day, Viktor began to long for the warmth of Yuuri's hand on his, and the heat that his lips had kindled.

The Dead Moon was now very close. Viktor had spent the previous fortnight hunting every evening, never venturing deep into the forest; he knew that he was watched, knew that the villagers had begun to wonder what he did in his night-time expeditions between the dark trees, and was careful to avoid suspicion, for Yuuri as much as for himself; he dreaded what the villagers might do to Yuuri if they caught them together, dreaded the ignorance and hatred with which they approached everything to do with The Forest.

Viktor curtailed his expeditions at the Cut, knowing that Yuuri never ventured farther than that into the forest, and that this would present Yuuri falling victim to any spies that might be following him. Although he didn't know the full extent of Yuuri's powers ( _for all I know_ , he thought, _he's perfectly capable of defending himself against an entire army here in his own domain_ ) Viktor still felt a powerful urge to keep Yuuri secret, to keep him safe from the true ugliness of humanity. Viktor had never told him of what he had suffered at the hands of the villagers, and he would die before he saw Yuuri exposed to their malice.

Every night, as Viktor entered the forest to hunt, bundled in furs and with his breath steaming in front of him, he felt Yuuri's presence as a calming whisper in his mind. The dark trees seemed to welcome him, murmuring in the freezing wind that cut exposed skin like knives of ice, and the odd stray snowflake would drift against Viktor's skin like a gentle kiss, immediately melting to nothingness.

At these moments, it was all Viktor could do not to run to Yuuri, to abandon the life that he led here; but every time these thoughts threatened to overwhelm him, he pictured the pitiful thinness of the village children if he didn't keep them fed, and the house which his mother had made a home, and he regained control of himself, focussing only on the scent of the trees and the frozen over tracks that would lead him to his next kill.

Although Viktor couldn't see Yuuri, couldn't seek him out as he longed to, he found a way to let Yuuri know that he had not forgotten his promise to return.

Every day, when he ventured into The Forest, Viktor brought a token with him from among his meagre possessions. The first day it was a pressed flower, bright and alien in the winter landscape, the second a small jet black rock that Viktor had found with a perfect hole in the centre.

Viktor left them by the edge of the Cut, in a small hollow in the ground, and when he returned the next day they had always disappeared; in their place, a handful of pine needles that Viktor recognised, their blue grey sheen too distinctive to be mistaken. Viktor saved the needles, keeping them in a bowl by his bed; they were his only connection to Yuuri, the only tangible evidence that he had that the whole episode had not been a dream. Every night when Viktor collapsed into his bed, exhausted from the night's hunt, he ran his fingers through them, their softness prickled here and there with sharp points like needles through velvet, remembering the feel of bark underneath his hand and the warmth of Yuuri's hand on top of his own.

Viktor hunted every night, and was able to store a good amount in the village smokehouse before the deadline that Yuuri had given him arrived. Though it wasn't as much as he would like, it would be enough to keep the villagers from starving until the spring and the return of the sun.

Just as Yuuri had predicted, on the first full moon after Viktor left him, the Dead Moon arrived, and the cold fell like a hammer blow. It seemed to be worse, more violent than it ever had been this year, Viktor thought as he huddled in his small wooden house, sitting a few inches from the small fire to absorb as much of its heat as he could.

The town well froze solid, and the river became a block of black ice, split with elegant white streaks where the water had frozen mid-flow. People were forced to melt bocks of ice over their meagre fires in order to obtain water, and within a week of the Dead Moon arriving, the snows had arrived too, falling at night and freezing solid by the next morning, forming fantastical shapes as the flakes were whipped upwards by the biting wind. The world was beautiful, and glittering, and deadly.

Viktor spent his time inside, trying to remember if he had ever seen cold like this in all his years. It was as though the winter Gods had finally noticed their small settlement, and were trying to squeeze the life out of them slowly, draining their vitality and warmth into the howling wind in a slow, agonising trickle. Viktor spent hours sitting in front of the fire, wrapped in the furs Yuuri had given him, dreaming of the warmer days spent under the white pine, and imagining what Yuuri's eyes would look like in the spring sunshine when it finally returned.

Two weeks came and went, and the Dead Moon was half spent, before Viktor was sure that this was no ordinary deep cold. Houses had started to split apart, the last vestiges of moisture in their beams freezing and expanding, popping open joints and logs, and allowing access to the wind that howled like a hungry wolf, day and night.

Viktor began to hear murmuring voices through the thick wood of his door, and the occasional angry shout. He put it down to the usual cabin fever of the winter months, and returned to his waking dreams of Yuuri, shivering and lonely.

One night, when the cold seemed to have reached its deepest, most penetrating bitterness, Viktor was sitting cross-legged on his woven rug in front of the fire, wearing nearly every single piece of clothing he possessed in an attempt to trap his non existent body heat within their layers. He held his pale hands out toward the small fire, trying to coax some life back into his numb fingers; he knew he would have to be careful to ration his firewood if he wanted to survive the winter, so the fire was never quite as roaring as he would have liked it to be. The dim golden firelight wove into his silver hair, tinting it in fiery red and orange, and the occasional spark shot up into the dimly lit room, briefly lighting the darkness, flickering and dying before it could reach the floor. The only sound was the howling wind, and the faint crackle of the flames as they danced, and Viktor allowed his mind to wander, lost in the changing tapestry of flame in front of him.

There was a sharp, sudden knock on his wooden door, violent and demanding. Viktor shot up out of his cross legged position, his heart pounding with surprise, his mind whirring as he tried to work out who could possibly be out on a night like this, in the deepest pit of a winter night.

Viktor crossed the small room in a few strides, feeling the blood flow back into his feet, and cracked open the wooden door so as to allow as little heat as he could out. The two inch gap that he made revealed a sight that caused his blood to freeze in his veins, an appalling presentiment of what Viktor suspected was about to befall him. With a sickening sensation of dread creeping through his mind, Viktor opened the door more fully, exposing himself to the biting wind.

Standing in front of the door, ranged in several rows reaching back to the middle of the street, was nearly every inhabitant of the village over the age of twelve, men, women, boys and girls. They carried flaming torches, the air thickened with the stench of reeds and animal fat as they burned. On their faces was an ugly expression of fear, mixed with a curious sort of excitement.

Directly in front of Viktor stood the Headman of the village, a middle aged man with dirty black hair and grease stained leather clothing. Viktor looked into his eyes, and saw bloodlust and fear mingling in a toxic blend of pure malice.

"What is the meaning of this?" Viktor asked, his voice strong, carrying out to the back of the crowd. One or two of the younger villagers shivered at the sound.

"Viktor Nikiforov," said the Headman, his voice rough and thickened with drink, "The Gods are angry with us. This winter has already killed three, and it is the worst we have seen for a hundred years, maybe a hundred hundred years. The town elders have discussed it, and we have decided that the Gods are punishing us for harbouring spawn of the devil within our borders." The Headman spat at Viktor's feet, the spittle freezing as soon as it hit the floor. Viktor felt a ribbon of ice cold fear uncurl down his spine, as the presentiment that had struck him when he first saw the ugly expressions and the torches was confirmed.

The Headman nodded to two men either side of him, and they roughly elbowed past Viktor into the house, knocking him aside when he tried to block them.

"No, please, please!" Viktor cried, his voice thin in the howling wind, terror making him inarticulate. "I have done nothing! I have spent my entire life trying to keep this village alive through the winters! I have-"

Viktor broke off, as he saw the two men that now stood like an alien presence in the centre of his room raise their torches, and then drop them, the rug and the wood floor catching like a tinderbox. Viktor stepped forward, towards the flames, trying to think of a way, any way to prevent what was happening, but was forced backwards by the heat, the flames now running up towards the ceiling, unstoppable and voracious. The villagers cheered behind him, their voices harsh and inhuman, as they saw him retreat.

"We cast you out, Viktor Nikiforov, we cast you out!" chanted the Headman, his voice climbing in pitch and volume. The chant was taken up by the villagers behind him, slowly, until every one of them was chanting in unison, their torches making their uplit faces into masks of malice, "We cast you out! WE CAST YOU OUT!"

Viktor stumbled out of the house, his face soot blackened, tears glittering on his cheeks as he saw the room in which his mother had sung to him, where she had held him, where she had died, consumed by the flames. In their dancing depths he seemed to see phantasms of her face, her soft voice echoing mockingly from the spitting pile of blackening wood, ' _You are destined for great things, Vitya… One day, your destiny will find you'._

 _It has found me_ , though Viktor numbly, the chanting behind him an ominous rumble, as the roof of his house succumbed to the flames and caved in on itself with a crash. He felt two rough pairs of hands gripping his shoulders, and wondered if he was about to die.

"See, O Gods!" chanted the Headman over the continued roar of the crowd, "We have cast the devil from among us! He shall die in the snows as you wish! Save us from the Dead Moon and the deep cold, we who have obeyed your commands!"

Viktor felt himself hauled roughly away from the burning building, the crowd following him, swallowing him in its depths as they spat and chanted, their torches burning ugly wounds into the darkness, spitting in the freezing wind. They stopped at the boundary of the town, and Viktor felt the hands on his elbows release him; his body and mind still too numb to respond, he turned and looked back at the Headman.

"Begone from us, demon," the Headman cried, his voice richly satisfied, "Begone and never return!"

Viktor looked at these people, these villagers, who had known him his whole life, from cradle to man. He looked at their inhumanly gleeful, jeering faces, lit by the flickering remains of his house, all his earthly goods destroyed by their hand. Tears began to run down his face, exposing white trails of his skin gleaming beneath the soot.

Viktor turned, wrenching his gaze away from the last glimpse of his burning home, and stumbled away into the darkness, hearing the cheer that went up as he did so. His heart broke, and he began to sob in earnest, his breath clouding and immediately freezing in a haze of ice crystals as he moved away from the pool of light cast by the rude torches. He tripped, and sprawled on the rock hard snow, the cold shocking him out of his numbness.

 _Yuuri,_ he thought, _I have to get to Yuuri. I'll die if I stay exposed out here for long._

The cold was wrapping its insidious tendrils around him even now, the wind working into every tiny gap in his clothing, and Viktor was, in a dim and distant part of his mind, grateful that he had been wearing nearly all his clothes when he had been banished.

Viktor lurched to his feet, and began to make his slow, torturous way up to the tree line. The Forest appeared slowly in front of him, looming from the darkness; every branch was rimed in frost, every tree a glittering fortress of icicles, pointing toward Viktor as though in a malediction. The cold leeched his breath from his lungs, stealing the oxygen as it tried to make its way down Viktor's throat, and he began to lose his train of thought.

With every step, feet slipping on the slick ground, Viktor felt one thought repeat itself in his sluggish brain; _get to Yuuri. Get to Yuuri_.

Viktor crashed into a tree, his mind having failed to move his limbs in time to avoid it, and icicles came crashing down around him, spearing themselves in the snow or shattering in a rain of crystal shards as they hit the iron hard ground. One caught itself on Viktor's shoulder, and he cried out as he felt the ice penetrate his skin. A bird that he had disturbed with his cry flew up into the night sky, disappearing before it could be caught in the deadly rain of ice.

Viktor was deep in amongst the trees now, the landscape around him ghostly and glittering, lit by the uncaring moon high above him. Viktor's silver hair caught and bound the moonlight, and his pale skin shone where it wasn't covered by soot. He looked like a being spun of moonbeams, made human and dropped clumsily in amongst the branches, crying for his lost home.

As the edges of Viktor's vision began to slowly blacken, and his feet began to stumble more frequently, the dim light suddenly cast a familiar tree into relief, and his straining eyes showed him that the Cut was no more than thirty feet ahead of him. With a cry of relief, Viktor crashed forwards through the underbrush, more falling than walking. _Get to Yuuri_ , his mind repeated sluggishly, _get to Yuuri_.

Viktor looked at the Cut, swaying as he stood at the edge, his limbs feeling like blocks of unresponsive wood. _Get to Yuuri._

He back up a few paces, his vision now almost entirely lost, his heart roaring in his ears, and began to run towards the chasm ahead of him.

Viktor leapt; and fell. His body crashed to earth at the edge of the Cut, before he could even attempt to make it across, and his hand lay stretched out into the empty gap, his white fingers luminous in the darkness.

Viktor lay, a statue of marble in a world of ice, and knew no more.

oooooooooooooooo

For Yuuri, the Dead Moon was the quietest and most restful time of the year. The animals were all hibernating, the only ones that still talked to him the hardy mountain ravens that loved to gossip with him in the evening before they returned to their bowers. The trees were silent, their slow speech quieted as they slept through the winter.

Yuuri sat now, high above the forest on the branch that he had shared so often with Viktor, holding the round stone with a perfect hole bored through the centre that Viktor had left him as though it was a talisman.

Yuuri had not expected to see Viktor until after the Dead Moon, knowing that he would have to hunt, and that the villagers needed his help to survive the winter. Yuuri had prepared his heart for the long weeks of aching that faced him, Viktor's presence so near and yet so far, hidden behind his wooden walls. Even when he was within the forest Yuuri could not approach him, for fear of bringing unwanted attention to Viktor if any of the villagers that followed him through the trees should see them.

So he had been shocked, and delighted, and his heart had warmed with a persistent small glow when he had discovered the first of Viktor's tokens, a dried marigold, a splash of gold against the frosty floor directly next to the Cut. Yuuri had taken it back to the white pine, and spent an hour staring at it with a slightly stunned expression, before running back to the spot he had found it and leaving a handle of pine needles in his place. Viktor's token felt like a hand outstretched across the distance between them, and Yuuri wanted to extend a hand back. They had continued this pattern every day, and the small things that Viktor had left for Yuuri had been placed in the heart of the white pine, forming a small collection of oddments that Yuuri loved fiercely.

Even though Yuuri couldn't talk to Viktor, he could at least ensure his safety when he walked in the forest. Yuuri had spoken to the trees, and the animals (with a particularly stern lecture for the wolves), instructing them that not one hair on Viktor's head was to be touched when he stepped inside the forest boundaries. The animals all learned that 'the moon haired one' was not prey, nor was he to be allowed to wander into the dangerous areas of the forest, riddled with bogs and marshlights that would tempt a traveller off the safe path. _This much at least_ , thought Yuuri, _I can do_.

The cold, when it hit, had no effect on Yuuri. He wandered as he ever did, in the same silver furs, his bare feet dancing across the frozen snow as though it were the softest swansdown. Though it marked the end of Viktor's daily tokens, Yuuri welcomed the cold, as it heralded one day closer to the return of the sun, and the return of Viktor with it.

The ache of Viktor's absence had only grown inside Yuuri's heart since he had left, the glorious memory tinged with sadness in Yuuri's minds eye. He had taken to sitting on what he now thought of as _their_ branch, reliving their conversations, searching every flicker of Viktor's remembered expression for hidden meanings, like an endlessly evolving and fascinating puzzle.

It was in the deepest part of the deep cold, a night when the moon hung high in the night sky like a beacon, that the bird found Yuuri. He had been sitting as he usually did, back propped against the ancient tree, legs stretched along its length and eyes fixed on the tapestry of stars above him, when a mountain raven had flown shrieking and agitated into his branches, landing with a slight prickle of claws on his outstretched foot.

The bird's language was so fast and worried that Yuuri took a moment to understand. Reaching out to the bird, he ran a finger down its soft plumage, the black feathers soft under his cool hand, and the bird calmed somewhat.

 _What is the matter, wing-child?_ Yuuri asked, his voice soft and comforting in the raven's mind.

 _The moon haired one!_ It shrieked in its guttural language. _The one you warned us of! The one that was not to be allowed to suffer any harm within the forest borders!_

Yuuri felt his heart stop beating for one terrible moment.

 _What has happened?_ He demanded, his voice urgent and harsh with terror. The bird bristled in fear, its feathers fluffing up in alarm at his tone.

 _I am sorry,_ Yuuri said, gentling his voice with an effort. _Can you tell me what has happened?_

The bird related the human stumbling into his tree, half dead with cold; he told Yuuri of the man even now stretched out in the snow where the chasm of the Cut cleft the ground.

Yuuri was gone before the raven had a chance to spread its wings, and it caught itself in flight as its perch abruptly vanished, the tree whispering quietly in the wind as though in a requiem.

Yuuri hurtled through the dark forest, his feet barely touching the ground, his heart a sickening drumbeat of terror. He saw the Cut approaching, and barely paused in his approach, leaping across it and landing lightly on the other side, eyes frantically searching the ground, afraid of what he might find, even more afraid of finding nothing.

There, by the chasm, lay Viktor, his silver hair pooling around his form as he lay face down on the iron hard snow, his skin ghostly and no pulse visible in his exposed neck. Yuuri ran to him with a cry, which echoed off the iron hard tree trunks, mocking him as it grew fainter and fainter on the air. He gently turned Viktor's prone form over, cradling him in his arms, brushing the strands of silver hair out of his eyes, with a sickening sense of déjà vu as he remembered the last time he had found Viktor in the forest, his lifeblood staining the ground. No blood was visible this time, and Viktor's eyes were closed, his perfect face as still as though he were sleeping.

Yuuri listened for one agonising heartbeat; a breath! Faint, and laboured, but he had heard a breath! His heart flaring with the heat of hope, Yuuri closed his eyes to the glittering forest, and dived into the spirit world, always present but invisible to all but him.

Viktor's moonglow of spirit, which usually filled his frame with a soft light, was nearly gone, only the faintest of flickers centred around his heart still present. Yuuri saw that this was holding on tenaciously, refusing to fade into the night air.

After a moment's examination, Yuuri opened his eyes and picked Viktor up softly in his arms, the set of his chin determined and his black eyes flaring with small flashes of light, like lightning forks in a dark sky. He looked less human, in that moment, than he ever had, his skin pearlescent and pale, his eyes consumed by white fire, and his lithe form holding Viktor as though he weighed no more than air.

Yuuri darted into the wood, leaving a trail of faint light behind him, his footsteps hardly touching the ground as he ran, he almost flew, back to the white pine. Leaping agilely from branch to branch, he lifted Viktor effortlessly into the central chamber, the pale heartwood of the tree glowing in the darkness, the moss rendered colourless by the pale moon.

Yuuri knew what had to be done, and what it would cost him, but he did not hesitate. He laid Viktor's terrifyingly limp and cold body down in the centre of the tree, and laid a gentle kiss on his forehead, his smooth, cool lips leaving the faintest of impressions on Viktor's skin before fading away. Yuuri then sat next to Viktor, his legs crossed, holding Viktor's hands in his own, and began to breathe softly and rhythmically.

Yuuri closed his eyes, the moonlight immediately extinguished, the only sound his own breath and his heartbeat, and the faint, irregular beating of Viktor's heart. Yuuri fell into the darkness where the spirits lived, and saw Viktor's, now no brighter than a match flame in the endless darkness. He saw his own, a blazing sun in comparison, and beneath them, threaded through the white pine in a series of root like tendrils, the lifeblood of the tree. He breathed in and out through his nose, Viktor's scent filling his mind, and he reached for his own lightning bright spirit, threading it through Viktor's veins, reviving the blackened flesh of his fingers.

It wasn't enough. Yuuri's spirit reached Viktor's wrists, and then stopped, as though an invisible barrier prevented it from reaching inwards toward the flickering flame at Viktor's heart. Yuuri gritted his teeth, and forced more of the pale green light into Viktor's hands, channelling it with all his might, but there was no change; it glowed more forcefully, blinding in the dark liminal place, but still stopped at the wrists, prevented from reaching where it was needed.

Yuuri's heart began to race, an agony deeper than heartache setting into his bones. He breathed calmly still, but in his mind, in the darkness where his love's spirit was rapidly fading beyond his help, Yuuri screamed. He thought of the many years ahead of him, an eternity, alone and having known love only for it to be torn away. He thought of the endless cycle of years, eclipsed by the one blazing moment that Viktor's lips had met his own, a thousand lifetimes worth less to him than that one brief minute.

And as if the white pine heard Yuuri's scream, his agony, his unbearable torment, the tendril like glowing vines of its spirit curled upwards, reaching for Yuuri as a loving parent reaches for a feverish child. Yuuri, in return, reached out for the tendrils, and felt the will of the tree in his mind; he was its spirit, and its child, but the tree itself possessed a life force greater than him, greater than the whole forest which had sprung up from its roots.

Yuuri grasped the deep green tendrils, and his head snapped back, mouth open in a silent scream as power rushed through him. He held tightly to Viktor's hand, feeling the bones grind with the force of his grip, and rammed into the barrier that prevented him from saving this mortal man that he loved.

The barrier broke, overwhelmed by the onslaught of power. Deep green light that blazed with the determination of a thousand thousand trees, that sprung with the patience of endless roots uncurling in white silence beneath the dark earth, that snapped with the vitality of a million leaves that unfurled in the sun to drink in its life-giving warmth, slammed into Viktor's veins from Yuuri's hands, chasing itself in a leaping tapestry throughout Viktor's body, burning the deathly blackness out of him. Yuuri saw his own spirit stream across their linked hands, melding with the light of the tree, and pulsing through Viktor's now blazing form in his mind's eye. Yuuri wasn't sure how much more of this overwhelming power he could survive, his vision whiting out, his heart racing faster and faster and then-

Silence. Yuuri unlocked his hands from where they had gripped Viktor's, the long imprint of his fingers lividly white on Viktor's skin. Viktor was a blazing pyre in his magical vision, a mass of a jewel bright green, and his own pale green like the underside of a fern. Yuuri watched, spellbound, as the light grew and grew, rising higher and higher, seeming to consume Viktor in its radiance, before it fell in upon itself, dwindling to the familiar pearlescent shimmer that Viktor always possessed. And with that final collapse, Yuuri heard a sound that made him gasp, and tears start in his eyes. A shuddering, vital breath.

Yuuri buried his face in the soot-blackened furs that Viktor wore, and sobbed. Eventually, exhausted, he opened his eyes and saw that Viktor was now sleeping peacefully, his eyes shut, his breathing even.

Yuuri pulled one of his furs over from one side of the room, and draped Viktor with it, curling underneath it with him and nudging his way under Viktor's arm. His head pillowed on Viktor's chest, his rhythmical and strong heartbeat a soothing lullaby, Yuuri drifted into his waking dreams, and his last conscious thought when he closed his eyes was that his own blazing sun of a spirit had disappeared. In its place, there was a pale covering of spirit, very like Viktor's own, that spread over his whole body.

Yuuri had known the cost, known what he would be sacrificing to save a man who was nearly dead, but he hadn't hesitated, and he had nor regrets now that the deed was done. With that final thought, he wandered off into his lucid dreams, remembering how Viktor had looked when he had kissed him beneath the white oak.

Viktor woke up.

This surprised him; he had not expected to wake up again, not expected to feel warm after his now-hazy journey through the midnight ice maze of the forest. But he was warm; warm, and comfortable, and….

He looked down, surprised to feel the weight of another person cradled against his chest. All he could see was dark hair, and a pale wood ceiling above him, achingly familiar. But, that meant-

"Good morning," said Yuuri, sitting up as he felt Viktor move. He locked his eyes on Viktor's face, sitting up from under the comforting weight of his arm, and placed a hand on his cheek. Yuuri smiled to feel the blood pulsing in Viktor's neck, the undeniable life coursing through his veins.

Viktor place his hand over Yuuri's, and reached the other one out, gripping Yuuri by the waist and pulling him downwards. In that moment, all Viktor wanted to was to feel Yuuri, to know that he really was there in front of him and that this wasn't a cruel dream. Their breath mingled as Yuuri pressed his cool lips to Viktor's, tears wetting Viktor's cheeks as they fell from Yuuri's black eyes. Viktor let himself drown in the kiss, thinking of nothing but the solid warmth of Yuuri's waist under his hand, and the sensation as their lips moved against each other.

"So…I'm not dead then?" Viktor asked when they broke apart, his voice cracked with emotion and the remnants of the smoke that he had breathed the previous night.

"You're not dead," confirmed Yuuri solemnly, "though it was a close call. What…"

Viktor saw the question in Yuuri's eyes before he asked it, and flinched, causing Yuuri to trail off into silence.

Viktor sat up, feeling no hint of soreness or fatigue, which surprised him given his memories of the previous night.

"They…they cast me out of the village," Viktor confessed, his voice low and laced with pain like splinters of iron. "They said…that I was the reason for the terrible winter, that I was an unnatural being and that I had caused the Gods to turn their face from them. They burned…"

Viktor broke off, sobs that had been trapped in his chest since he had seen his home go up in flames wrenching their way out of his throat, and he buried his face in the furs that wrapped around him and let his heart spill out in the tears that burned his skin, the wracking, terrible pain that made itself heard as he wept for his lost home and the pain of his banishment.

Yuuri held him as he sobbed, his cool arms a balm to Viktor's soul, his firm grasp the only thing keeping the shattered remains of his heart together. Eventually, Viktor regained some control, and he looked up into Yuuri's black eyes, which were snapping with a fury that Viktor knew was not aimed at him.

"I'm…I'm homeless now," he said hoarsely, the knowledge hitting him with a terrible finality. "They burned my home. I have nowhere to…" Viktor trailed off, looking hopelessly out of the opening to the chamber to the empty air.

Yuuri placed his cool hands in a firm grip on Viktor's chin, turning his face so that their eyes met. "As long as I draw breath, Viktor Nikiforov," Yuuri stated, and the words were heavy with promise, "You will always have a home."

Viktor couldn't help but let more tears run down his face at this, but they were not burning with loss and pain and the terror of the mob; they were tears of relief, of joy, and of the overwhelming love that blossomed in his heart at Yuuri's words. Yuuri climbed into his lap, and tucked his dark head under Viktor's chin, linking his hands behind Viktor's back and planting a kiss on his collarbone.

As Viktor held Yuuri close to him, burying his nose in his dark hair that always smelled of rain, the steadily brightening sky illuminated them both, and Viktor felt the weight of a lifetime of fear and hatred lifting off his soul like morning dew at the first sight of the sun.

The people that had always despised him for his differences had finally revealed the depth of their hatred and the blackness of their souls, but that meant that Viktor was finally free of them. He no longer had any responsibility to them, no longer had to fight for any tiny scrap of approval that they might throw his way after a successful hunt. They probably, he thought, are toasting to my death in the snow this moment…

Viktor looked down at Yuuri's dark head, resting comfortably on his chest, and noticed for the first time that a white hair shone amongst the inky black.

"I never noticed this before," he said quietly, running a finger through the shining black locks. Yuuri, too comfortable to move, made a small inquiring hum. "Since when did you, immortal spirit, have any white hairs?" Viktor asked, trying to make his voice light and teasing.

Yuuri just smiled, and didn't answer, turning his face back towards the warmth of Viktor's chest.


	5. The Second Tree

The seasons passed around the First Tree, which stood tall and proud over the forest as it had for so many thousands of years, unchanged and strong.

Viktor and Yuuri remained too, creating a home together in the white heartwood of the tree, the always-warm air in the clearing bearing witness to the steady love that grew between them, expanding every day like the roots of the forest around them.

Viktor found a sense of peace, which was unlike anything he had ever known. Each morning, he would wake, not alone in the cold air of his old wooden hut, but warmed by the presence of Yuuri at his side. They spent their days wandering the forest, and Yuuri showed Viktor the secret paths, and the dens of shy animals, and introduced him to the raven that had saved his life.

Yuuri found that he finally had some purpose to his wanderings, knowing that they would always bring him back to Viktor.

As time passed, it became clearer and clearer that Yuuri was changing, his previously immutable and immortal body no longer free from time's constraints. Nothing dramatic occurred to make this clear; just a white hair here and there, and the occasional laugh line (for he and Viktor often laughed, sitting in their tree in the heart of their forest) wearing its way into the skin around his eyes.

So, he finally told Viktor of the night he had saved him, the sacrifice he had made; and Viktor held him close, and found that he could not be angry, not when the offering of his life had been given with so much love and such an unselfish heart.

So the seasons changed, and Yuuri changed with them, finding that the endless roll of the sun across the sky held a new meaning for him now. Nights were no longer lonely, and days were full of wonder as he saw the forest newly through Viktor's eyes. And they lived, and they loved, and they were happy.

There was only one secret that Yuuri kept from Viktor, and that was the fate of the village that had spurned him and cast him out to die in the snow. Yuuri, seeing his true love's body bloodless and cold as marble through the will of these people, had been possessed of a rage so strong that he bent the will of the forest with him, the trees becoming openly hostile to the dark haired villagers, dropping branches on a head or a limb that caused severe injuries, the animals fleeing as soon as they so much as crossed its threshold. The villagers began to murmur among themselves that the forest was cursed, that Viktor's sacrifice hadn't been enough to appease whatever spirits they had angered, and one day when the deep cold subsided, they packed up their belongings and left the tiny settlement, seeking better fortune across the hills. Yuuri watched them go from the treeline, his heart dark with hatred as he saw the burnt-out wreckage of Viktor's home, the only remnant of his life in that terrible place.

From that day onwards, they never spoke of Viktor's previous life in that hated village. Vines began to grow over the abandoned buildings, and the spring rains washed away the burnt timbers of Viktor's home, leaving the grass to grow again where the house had stood _. A new beginning_ , thought Yuuri, _for Viktor, and for the land_.

Sixty years passed, and Yuuri and Viktor grew old together in the shade of the white pine, a new day never dawning without them both being amazed and grateful for their companion, and in awe of the beauty of the love they shared.

One evening, when the forest was still and silent in late summer, with just a hint of autumnal freshness on the air, Yuuri and Viktor lay down together in the heart of the First Tree that had been their home for so many years, and they did not wake again. The light that had always been so rich in the clearing dimmed; the animals fled, and roots of the First Tree began to shrivel.

Within ten years of that night, the tree had rotted almost entirely away, just a shell of its former grandeur. The animals spoke of that clearing as a desolate place, no longer the haven to them it had once been; the trees spoke no more, their silence an elegy to the spirit that had given them life.

Another fifty years passed, then another hundred, the ever rolling march of the seasons not ceasing even while the forest mourned. Trees grew over the old site of the settlement, roots lifting old paving slabs from the ground and tearing their way through wood and stone, leaving not even a trace of the people who had lived and died there. The pool in the stream, in which a pale, naked and beautiful man had once bathed observed by secret eyes, still stood beneath the trees, its clear water reflecting their branches in a steady, unblinking gaze.

On a wet and windy day in late autumn, in the clearing that used to be called blessed, a strong breeze blew, and the shell of the old white pine finally collapsed in on itself with a dull crash. The sound echoed in the clearing like a final breath, and startled birds took flight, fleeing the desolate sound.

As the old bark crumbled away, there was a flash of vibrant green, peeking through the old, dead wood like a single, brief note in a silent land. As the wind blew again, the dead wood blew away, revealing in what had been the shelter of its shell a strong, young pine sapling, which had been growing sheltered by the old tree from the wind and the frost.

Though no eyes but those of the birds that still ventured into the clearing observed it, the sapling grew, year on year, maturing into a tall pine that stood level with the tops of the forest.

A thousand years passed, and the animals began to speak of another tree, like the First Tree, that had grown up in the centre of the clearing that their distant ancestors had spoken of as a healing place. They returned, moving their small families across the forest that now covered uncountable miles as far as the eye could see, to witness the rebirth of the First Tree.

When they reached the clearing, they saw the sapling had grown into a white pine as tall and strong as the tree they held as a legend, and that the sunlight that streamed into the clearing was richer, warmer than elsewhere in the forest. The foxes made new dens in its roots, and the birds returned to its branches, their calls rejoicing in the return of the blessed white pine.

Another thousand years passed, and lichen grew thickly on the Second Tree, as countless generations of animals lived and died in its roots and branches. The frost never touched it, and the air of the clearing regained its clarity. No humans ever ventured near the forest again, and the animals' collective memory forgot the time that they were all subject to fear, hunted by that violent tribe.

One winter morning, when the ground glittered with frost and the needles of the white pine were heavy with snow, something in the clearing seemed to stir.

Another hundred years passed, and the spring arrived, bringing with it the singing of the sap in the veins of every tree in the forest.

And within the heart of the Second Tree, there was a thought, and the thought was 'We'.

Another season passed, and the summer arrived, hot and slow and languid, draping itself over the forest and winding into the strong young leaves and flowers, and the tree had a second thought, and the thought was 'We are…"

And, uncounted seasons after the thought deep in the heart of the Second Tree, the wood opened wide as its ancestor had done, so long ago now that it was not remembered in the oldest song, and two figures leapt forth.

Viktor and Yuuri looked up at each other, their pale bodies reborn from the heart of the tree in which they had died, and they laughed aloud at the new life in each other's eyes. The forest, so long silent, burst forth into life around them, the trees crooning their long, slow words of welcome after millennia of silence, the birds singing their joyful songs, and the howling of the wolves a salute to the spirit of the forest, finally returned to them after so long away.

Yuuri reached out his hand, and Viktor grasped it, and the two ran through their forest, immortal, joyful, and reunited.


End file.
